Waiting room

If 1967 was America’s Summer of Love, 2009 will be remembered as the Summer of Anger. Town halls became “town hells” and tempers flared on the Internet and across other media.

But let’s imagine that tomorrow major global problems were solved and the chasm that blue and red Americans scream across was closed. I think we’d still be a pretty angry lot.

Why? Because most of our routine anger is rooted in impatience. Impatient people are inherently aggressive and inclined to harbor an ever-simmering level of frustration. And Americans (alongside other affluent Westerners) have cultivated impatience.